


Decades

by jericho



Category: Dolanverse, Heartbeats (2010), Les Amours Imaginaires, Xavier Dolan - Fandom, Xavier Dolanverse
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love, blowjobbery, canadian movie fic, lgbtq movie fic, queer movie fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:01:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22655185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jericho/pseuds/jericho
Summary: Francis always wondered what magic made fickle people settle on someone. If it was the right combination of words, the right edge of mystery, the right BMI. Whatever it was, he didn't have it. He never had.
Relationships: Francis/Nic (Heartbeats)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Decades

Francis was sitting in a coffee shop in Old Montreal, down the street from Notre Dame, when he looked up and saw Nicolas.

He didn't recognize him at first. Nine years had passed, or was it ten? Francis looked down at his coffee cup and did silent math on his fingers. He’d been living in Outremont, in the apartment with the cupboard doors that never closed, and the windows so drafty breeze seeped around the panes. And there had been his marks on the walls. His Robinson Crusoe lines for each time he was rejected. If he thought about them enough, each of them still felt like fresh scabs, even though he was older, and harder, and changed.

His heart had erupted in fireworks every time he’d seen Nicolas then, an intoxicating obsession dragged out like a body behind a car. It was different now. Nic's hair was shorter and darker, and with the curls cut off, the intimidation was gone. His features seemed misaligned somehow, and he wore gloves, an orange vest and work boots. He’d probably worn that kind of thing when Francis had known him too, away from the parties and the book shops.

Francis looked at the local art for sale on the walls, then down at his coffee again, and tried to measure how he felt. He felt a pang of hurt on first glance, a sudden dart through his heart, and it was still there as the organ pumped around it. It would be easier, he supposed, if he had someone, but he didn't. He hadn’t for a while. Nic most certainly did. The girl Francis had seen him with at a party ten years ago - the girl with the rockabilly style - was likely long gone, replaced again and maybe again. Francis always wondered what magic made fickle people settle on someone. If it was the right combination of words, the right edge of mystery, the right BMI. Whatever it was, he didn't have it. He never had.

He was at the bottom of his coffee cup, but he couldn't go yet. Not now. He felt Nic walk through the coffee shop, hands in his pockets, and he thought about his escape. Maybe Nic would order and sit near the back. Maybe he wouldn't even recognize him. Francis took his mug to the tray for dirty dishes and dropped it as quietly as possible, and left. He kept his head down against the fall wind, hugging his jacket around him as he passed the window. When he felt eyes on him, he was sure it was his imagination. His James Dean haircut was gone. So was his knitted toque. The leather boots, though, they were still there. They always would be. 

His work was a half block away. Jane Jenkins Advertising, a boutique agency with clients like law firms and companies that made hair care products. Francis’s current job was a McGill University ad campaign with the motto _dream bigger_. He’d come up with a creative concept for it. The black background. The white lettering. The sophisticated font, and bold colours via equally bold shapes, like pink squares, blue circles and yellow triangles. He designed business cards, and stationery, and new fall lookbooks. There would be new billboards and new ads on the sides of buses. He was making the manual that included new ways to use the logo so the university's graphic designer could do smaller jobs in-house. Francis's desk was bare, his files organized, his area wiped clean. He looked at his finger on the mouse and saw the skin around the nail was bleeding, and sucked it into his mouth. It has been a while since he'd gnawed his finger bloody like that.

He looked at the scrolling screensaver he'd memorized at this point. Sunset. Gorilla. Polar bear. He took out his phone and texted Marie.

 _Guess who I just saw?_ he typed.

There was a bubble with 3 dots. It disappeared, then reappeared again. _Changing baby_ , she said. _One sec._

He rested his elbow on the desk and touched the mouse, and Photoshop was back. 

_Who?_ she said.

_Nicolas. He was just walking down the street. He looked like a construction worker._

_OMG! Blast from the past._

He looked for more and it didn't come, so he drew in a breath and went back to work. 

Fuck that guy, he thought. Fuck that guy who wasn't even hot anymore. Fuck that guy who said, at one point, the most painful thing anyone has ever said to him. He’d sat in Nic's apartment on a ledge in front of a dormant fireplace. The ceilings were high. The walls were plain white, and Nick's dad was paying for it.

_I love you_ , he’d told the floor, his hands shaking, his cheeks hot and numb. He had seen a car crash into a pickup truck when he was 14. He'd been walking home from school and locked eyes with the driver right before the driver pulled out in a confident arc and smashed into the truck. Francis had felt the same way then as he did at Nic’s, as the seconds passed like tightrope walkers. Heated cheeks. Tingling fingers. Shock. And then Nic had said it. _How could you think I was gay?_

Francis’s breathing quickened as he thought about it. People like Nic thrived on getting under people's skin. They were sociopaths. Tomorrow, Francis thought, he would stop at the coffee shop like he did every day. Nic wouldn't be there. He was a retreating ship, and Francis would never see him again. 

The next day, Francis sat at the counter by the window at lunch, eating a burrito and reading an Architectural Digest. _Back in Hollywood’s golden age_ , said the article, _Wallace Neff was the man who shaped the idea of what movie-star life looked like_. He didn’t pay attention when the bell rang behind him. He didn't until he heard his name. 

“Francis?” 

Francis turned and looked at the asymmetrical face, at the truncated curls, and at the skin dry from the weather. Francis expected him to smell like gas or dust, but he didn't smell like anything. 

“Hey.” 

“It’s me. Nicolas? We met years ago.” 

They’d done more than meet. They’d travelled to the country together. They’d all slept in the same bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.” He looked at the empty stool next to him, wondering if he should tell him to sit. “How are you?” 

“Good.” Nic slid onto the stool anyway, layers of clothes crunching and orange vest assaulting Francis like a blaze. “I was thinking about you recently.” 

“Yeah?” Francis went back to his burrito. He knew better than to fall for that. 

“Yeah. Wondering how you’re doing. How are you doing?” 

“Great.” Francis nodded at the vest. “You work around here?” He was only asking to be polite. 

“Public works with the city. We fix broken water mains. We go wherever they’re broken. This is an old part of the city, so a lot of them break." 

Francis nodded and took a bite of his burrito. 

“What about you?” Nic asked. “Where are you?” 

Francis gestured toward the street as he chewed and swallowed. “I work at an ad agency near here. Graphic design.” 

“You always were artistic.” Nic watched him as he smiled, and Francis stayed focused on the burrito. “Give me your number. We’ll have a drink after work one day.” 

Francis put down the burrito and took out his phone. “You give me your number.” 

Nic gave it to him, and watched Francis type it in. “Text me right now,” Nic said. 

Francis stared at his phone. He hadn’t planned to text him at all. Instead, he typed in a smiley face and sent it. 

“Great. See you, Frankie.” Nic leaned forward and kissed his cheek. 

Francis didn’t reciprocate. He just rubbed it and smiled a little. “Bye.” 

He didn’t see Nicolas the next day, but on Friday, he got a text. _Frankie… come watch Audrey Hepburn at my place tonight. I know you like her._

Francis was at a boardroom table when it arrived, and as he looked, his boss’s voice faded. Nic called him “Frankie” ten years ago too. Had Nic remembered that, or did his brain summon that nickname all over again, not realizing it was an old habit? Clearly, he remembered the poster Francis bought for him back then of Audrey Hepburn. He’d paid $15 then, but was prepared to lie and say he paid 10. _Whatever. I just saw it. I buy posters all the time, for no reason. No big deal._

__Francis looked out the window and saw a window on the same level across the street. A woman was pushing a vacuum cleaner. Back and forth, over the same spot._ _

He set his phone face down on the table. Someone was asking him a question. 

A coworker: “Can you do it?” 

“Yeah, I can do it.” Francis’s stomach lurched like waves. This was a bad idea. He’d be a worm on a hook again. Plunged into the toxic cycle of waiting, looking, crying, waiting. The moment he left Nic’s place, he’d be checking his phone again, even though he was older and harder and changed. 

The meeting ended and his coworker looked at him. “We’re going for drinks after work. Want to come?” 

“I can’t. I’m busy.” He made the decision in four words, in one response. He’d go over for an hour and that was it. Just to peek and see if the place had changed. Just to see if Nic still had a raft of friends to hang out with, or if he'd have a kitchen full of them tonight, and he'd drunkenly kiss his cheek and turned Francis toward the crowd and say, "This is my old friend. I haven't seen him in so long. But I saw him and he remembered me. He remembered me." And Francis could nail him with it then: "No, I really didn't." 

Francis spun in a circle on his desk chair and answered the text. _OK, what time?_

** 

Francis stood in the liquor store, looking at bottles of wine, and wondered which one he should take. He’d had time to go home and shower. He’d looked in the mirror at his shorter, messier hair, and his two days worth of beard growth, and his forest green sweater, and he’d tried not to look at the wall to his right. He used to make a mark every time someone rejected him, but he hadn’t made those marks in a long time. And Nic wouldn’t get another one. 

He looked at the colourful wine labels, and the varieties ranging from pale chardonnays to blood red merlots. Maybe, he thought, he should just take what he wanted to drink, so he went to the next aisle and grabbed twice as many ciders as he usually would to get himself drunk. 

He took the metro two stops to Nic’s, and walked past a pink brick wall with a painted silhouette of a man carrying balloons, and a blue mural with the words “Don’t stop believin’” in English. He walked two flights of stairs to Nic’s apartment and heard The Gogos on the other side. 

Nic answered with a lazy smile. “My friend.” Francis wasn’t prepared for the arms, thicker than they used to be, to circle his narrow shoulders, and a pair of lips to kiss his cheek. 

“Hi.” Francis lifted the cider to show him and followed him into the living room. Nic’s work coat hung over a chair. The afghan on the back of the couch was new. There were no photos at all, and the only art was a neon art print of David Bowie in the Ziggy Stardust era. Francis had seen it on sale for $10 in a poster shop. 

Nic sauntered into the kitchen and put the cider in the fridge, then took out one for each of them. “So how have you been?” 

“Good,” Francis said. “Just working. You know...working.” He felt the need to add more then. “I went to Osheaga this year.” 

“Yeah? I haven’t been there in so long, man. Too long.” Nic had already been drinking, Francis realized. Judging from the rubber-band movement of his limbs, he'd been drinking for a while. 

“Have you gone anywhere else?” Francis asked. “Last time I heard, you were going to Asia.” 

“Yeah. I spent a year there teaching French to adults in South Korea. Rich people who wanted to know another language.” 

“Did you learn any Korean?” 

“A little bit," Nic said. "I forgot most of it. I know _hello_ and _thank you_ and _do you have a boyfriend_.” 

“How do you say thank you?” 

“It sounds like 'gamsahabnida.'" 

“Gamsahabnida,” Francis repeated. Nic’s dad had paid for Nic to know that word. He’d paid for his son’s airfare to other countries. He’d owned summer homes Nic visited, and a condo in Florida for when the weather turned cold. Francis’s mom had worked at a dentist’s office, his dad long gone to another family in France. Francis didn’t actually know what his dad’s job was now. 

Francis took a deep swig of his cider and watched Nic fiddle with the TV. “How’s your friend?” Nic asked. “Marie.” 

__“She’s married now. She has a new baby.”_ _

__“Great.” Nic sat close enough to Francis that their legs touched, then tucked one leg under the other. The opening credits rolled of _Breakfast at Tiffany's_. Audrey Hepburn. George Peppard. Mickey Rooney as I. Y. Yunioshi, the offensively stereotyped Asian neighbour. Twenty minutes into it, Francis was on his second cider, and by the halfway mark, had finished a bourbon Nic had concocted in his kitchen._ _

__“The last time you were here…” Nic started, sometime around the climax._ _

__“Forget it.”_ _

__“No, I feel like I was…”_ _

__“Forget it.” At one point, Nic had tried to approach Francis and Marie at a party, and Francis, buoyed by the presence of Marie, had hissed at him like a raptor. Nic had wanted absolution, and he hadn’t deserved it, and any words to him would have fed his own excuses. Raptor had been the only alternative. Francis’s reasons for avoiding the subject were different now. It was a long-ago embarrassment resurfacing like a coin pried out of hardened dirt. “Forget it,” Francis repeated. “It’s fine.”_ _

__Nic leaned forward and held up his empty glass. “Want another drink?”_ _

__“Yes,” Francis said. “Fuck yes.”_ _

__**_ _

__A couple of years after Francis had known Nic, he’d read _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_. It was a short, tight, and very queer read. Holly had been Capote’s Mary Sue, elegant and poor, the centre of a room of hapless chaps. And the protagonist was gay. From the first line, Francis had somehow known._ _

__The movie had a different ending. Holly and the protagonist were in love. She released her cat in the rain, then ran after the man and embraced him. Then the credits rolled and Nic put on YouTube._ _

__They watched some episodes of a series about robots in love. Then they watched episodes of a show where people got drunk and cooked complicated dishes. By the second episode of that, Francis’s tongue was loose, his words flowing easily. The screen turned to scrolling photos. Sunset. Gorilla. Polar bear. “You can crash here,” Nic said. “I have a big bed.”_ _

__Francis put his head down, leaning his elbows against his knees, and wondered how to order the next sequence of events. His phone was somewhere. He knew he had the Uber app. What was his address again?_ _

__Francis emptied his glass and stood, walking ahead of Nic into the dark bedroom where the double bed looked like a mere mound of blankets. When he unbuttoned and dropped his pants, he heard change hit the floor. He stripped out of his shirt and dove into the bed in his boxers._ _

__It was less cute to do this now, he supposed, than it was ten years ago._ _

__He faced the closet, seeing the outline of clothes spilling out and an overflowing laundry basket of loosely folded clothes. With closed eyes, he listened to Nic stumble through the dark room, and heard the mattress squish behind him. The weight tilted Francis back a little, and he hung onto the side of the bed to stay in place._ _

__The little bit of movement made the room spin behind Francis’s eyelids, and a spill of random shapes flooded his brain. They were blue and pink and yellow against a black velvet backdrop. Then the bed stopped moving and the pattern changed again._ _

__Nic rolled, and Francis felt the scrape of toenails against his leg, then the touch of the coarse hair on Nic’s leg against his own. Francis lied still, watching the shapes change into variations, like the difference between McGill’s lookbook and its business cards. He’d seen his own design on the side of a bus once. He’d stood at the corner, waiting at the crosswalk, breathing into the scarf that covered his face as the bus rumbled past._ _

__He felt Nic’s fingers crawl up his arm, then down his side where the nerves were sensitive. Francis had schooled himself over the years on the art of casual male touches. This one was intimate._ _

__The dancing fingers turned into a firm palm, and it moved over Francis's stomach toward his belly button. Nic’s front was against his back, Francis realized, and Nic’s breathing was at the pace of a jog. Even by Nic standards, this stab at attention was going too far._ _

__Francis rolled onto his back, his brain shifting as he did, and Nic’s lips met his. He felt the heaviness of Nic’s breathing against him. He listened to the moist, soft sounds of their kissing._ _

__“I’m too drunk,” Francis whispered._ _

__“So am I.” Nic laughed._ _

__“Good,” Francis said, and he wasn’t sure why._ _

__He felt Nic’s fingers moving over his tented boxers, reaching in to touch his half erect penis. “You can fuck me,” Nic said._ _

__“I can’t yet. I can’t even…”_ _

__He heard the hush of sheets being pulled downward, then the cool air on his cock and the moistness of Nic’s mouth. Nic’s lips parted and he lowered, enveloping Francis inch by inch, until the wet warmth reached the base, then retreated, and there was friction. Francis whispered, rolling his hips like he’d done when he’d dreamed of Nic all those years ago, and he’d humped the bed and tried to come in his dream. He heard slurps, and felt long fingers, and angled toward the ache. It drew him closer, making his body chase something, making his brain hum with need. The cum spilled out of him, the orgasm pulled tight in his belly, and he thrust against Nic’s mouth until the need subsided._ _

__Nic looked up at him in the dark. “Are you sure you can’t fuck me?”_ _

__“I can finger you. Do you have lube?”_ _

__Nic moved up, and a drawer squeaked, and he rolled back onto his hands and knees. Francis took the lube, and when he sat up, his head swam with images again. He thought about waiting to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl in kindergarten. He’d gotten sick while he waited in line, just from the anticipation._ _

__Francis knelt behind him, slipping in the tangled sheets, and sank two lubricated fingers inside Nic. Alcohol made him indelicate; he didn’t think about pain. Nic bucked back against him, keening like an animal, and Francis added a third finger. He felt the tight ring of muscle close around him and pushed past it, and Nic’s hips moved with a violent lurch, pushing back against Francis’s hand like he was about to fuck the bed himself._ _

__Without thinking, Francis smacked Nic’s ass so hard that the sound was a fleshy staccato against the walls. “Jesus. Calm down.” He did it again then, harder, just for the sound. He angled his fingers downward, pressing against the walnut of flesh, first wiggling and then thrusting in and out. He touched Nic’s dangling cock with mild interest, wiggling his fingers over the damp tip, tapping the swaying balls. With a loose grip, he encompassed Nic’s shaft as he continued to finger fuck him. He felt the slap of his muscles and the squelch of lube, and then Nic’s quiet seeth. “More.”_ _

__Francis knew he could slip his whole hand inside and fist Nic like he was a pig on a spit. For now, though, he stopped at four fingers, sinking in nearly to the wide part of his knuckles, fucking him until their movements were a panting, dripping harmony. In and out. Wiggling his fingers. Hammering the walnut until Nic cried out like the wounded and tightened around Francis’s hand, and his cum spilled onto the bed in thick drops._ _

__Francis took care as he removed his hand. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he saw Nic pale and splayed, ass in the air. Francis smacked it one more time, just to see the twitch, and crawled back into his spot on the bed._ _

__Nic collapsed face down, cheek against the pillow. Francis looked at him then, then looked at the ceiling and closed his eyes._ _

__“Do you want to fuck me later?” Nic said._ _

__Francis kept his eyes closed. “Maybe.”_ _

__He felt the crawl of Nic’s fingers on his arm, and the creep of them toward his nipple, and he rolled away and faced the closet._ _

__He knew what Nic looked like behind him now. He knew what Nic wanted. He knew Nic would chase it. Now the most interesting thing in the room was ahead of him, with his pants near the open closet door and the phone inside the pocket, the future home of unanswered texts._ _


End file.
